This paper examines why smart phones have been singled out as the source of network congestion, how they attributed to the congestion and what strategies are available to mitigate the effects.
II. Impact on Wireless Cellular Networks.
Gartner reported that the worldwide sales of mobile devices in the 2nd quarter of 2011 were 428.7 million units of which 25% were smart phones [5]. Nielsen's survey of the 3rd quarter of 2011 shows that 43% of all US mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone which shows the staggering growth of smart phones [6]. The combined load that these millions of smart phones have put on today's networks has impacted wireless networks in the ways listed below:.
A. Capacity and Coverage Impact.
Major 3G systems such as UMTS and EV-DO use different implementations of code division multiple access (CDMA) technology as the air interface of their system, which is the radio-based communication link between the mobile phone and the network. CDMA system capacity and coverage is related to the number of active users in the network. Higher number of users creates more interference and increase the Signal-to-Noise ratio. To counteract these effects, the coverage and capacity of the network reduce [3]. The load put on the network by smart phones has the same effect as described above – the capacity and coverage of wireless networks has gone down, and subscribers have noted that coverage has gone down. This is a hard problem to solve for network carriers because to maintain capacity and coverage in the face of increasing load, they require additional spectrum.
B. Drop in End-User Experience.
The congestion caused by smart phones has had a serious effect on the Quality-of-Service (QoS) provided by the wireless networks. Users have experienced drops in coverage, lower quality voice calls, dropped calls, busy network situations and significantly slow data rates [11]. Additionally, the congestion experienced has led to constant change in the plans offered by the carriers.